People find a way to use your product different than what you thought. They will break it somehow & no body reads instructions. Yahoo’s business, product, engineering & design guys explain the evolving mobile strategy (building, shipping and getting products facing the consumer, knowing what they would like to see).

Every time you find yourself thinking, “Hmmmm, I don’t know about that”, or “Wow that’s complicated” - you’ve just identified the next thing you should spend time on.

Drive out the uncertainty as far as possible. If it’s a big problem that seems insurmountable, simplify it until you have somewhere you can start.

Work on creating a narrative that can be shared with others, to bring them in and make them part of the problem solving group.

The things that we don’t know are the things that can go wrong, and that can drag our projects out past our deadlines. They can derail our progress, disrupt our thinking, damage our plans and debunk our visions.

Remember in school when you had to show your working for maths? This was so the teacher could give you marks for getting the method right, but getting the final answer wrong.

In just the same way, showing your working at work will get you bonus points.

When you present a recommendation, smart people will naturally think of alternatives. They can’t help it. They will ask you about them, like “but wouldn’t it be easier if we X?”, and “yeah but I’m sure I’ve heard about a thing called Y that would work well here” and so on.

If you don’t mention the alternatives, it looks like you haven’t considered them and you’ll get pulled up. If you mention them first, then you’re one step ahead.

Presenting other options and then explaining why you discarded them is like showing your working. It also gets people nodding along and agreeing with you. Option 1 is no good because X, option 2 is no good because Y, and so on.

Then when you do get the recommended option, the alternatives are exhausted and everyone agrees with your conclusion because it feels natural and obvious. #winning

Someone said something the other day about learning. It was actually about learning how to learn, and it got me thinking.

How much effort should I put into learning to learn?

If my ability to learn is suboptimal, then a certain percentage of my time spent learning will be wasted. But of course if I’m not very good at learning, what makes me think I’ll be able to overcome that and learn how to learn better?

What would learning to learn even look like?

This is all a bit confusing, but the same idea sort of extends out to the products we build. Most of us do learning unconsciously. We don’t observe ourselves “doing learning” or recognise it as a skill in its own right.

What skills do our customers and users need to get the most out of our products? How manny of those skills are we taking for granted?

What is the likely lost benefit to users by not having expertise in that skill, and what would be the likely increase in the value of the experience for the user if they could increase their skill?

All through my MBA, I had a dream. I will one day walk into a room full of people and present my “new idea”. I will present the idea with a lot passion and vigor and at the end … at the end everyone will rise from their chairs and give a standing ovation.

But, I soon realized, within a few months into my own startup. Only results mattered, not the idea. You can share your idea in a presentation with everyone else, but if your idea doesn’t match to their own idea for the product, you are not going to impress them. So how do you get every one to love your idea?

Inception - You have to take your idea, and make it their idea. You need to make them believe it was what they always wanted to do. An idea that they came up with. Presentation plays an important role.

Identify the problems - Make sure everyone is aware and accepts the problems your startup is facing. If everyone is not solving the same problem, there is little chance you will have the same/similar plan of action to solve it.

Identify the Goal - You have identified 10 problems. But, your goal is to decide the biggest problem you want to fix, not everything. Agree on what problems you want to fix. This will increase your chances of agreeing on a solution.

Discuss - Here is when, your skills come into play. You have to ensure people have their voices heard (it will help you take a better decision too). And you should be able to integrate(reject if necessary) their suggestions into your plan. Only if you have their thoughts and ideas integrated can you have their buy-in, else you will have disgruntled people working on something that is forced on them.